A virtual machine (VM) can be considered an abstract computer that allows for portability of software applications between different underlying computer architectures, including different computer hardware platforms and/or operating systems. The VM provides a uniform layer of abstraction between the hardware platform and any compiled software applications that runs thereon. Virtual machines are considered essential for the portability of certain technologies, such as Java. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) allows compiled Java programs to be run on the JVM, independently of whatever hardware or operating system may be used underneath. Examples of available JVMs include the Oracle JRockit and Hotspot JVMs.
Recently, there is a desire to deploy virtual machines on high performance computer hardware systems, such as multi-processor rack-based servers, to support highly efficient application server and similar technologies. Examples of application servers which can provide such technologies are the Oracle WebLogic Server. In some instances, a hypervisor acts as an additional layer between the server's hardware and its operating system. This provides an additional abstraction layer that allows each physical server to run one or more virtual servers, and effectively decouples the operating system and its applications from the underlying physical server. This is of particular use in a cloud-based environment.
One feature that is commonly used in a VM and in pointer free languages such as Java is the array copy operation, in which the size of an array can be increased or decreased by allocating a new larger or smaller array, and copying the contents into the new array. However, array copying is a time expensive operation on modern hardware with its memory bandwidth limitations. Although techniques have been devised to reduce such copying, these techniques are not as successful at addressing conversion, such as by Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) drivers, between bytes received over the network to Strings usable within Java, particularly in newer high performance computer hardware systems. These are the general areas that embodiments of the present invention are intended to address.